Attachmate To Retain Novell Unix Copyrights

angry tapir writes "Novell's copyrights for the Unix operating system will remain under Attachmate's control as part of the companies' pending merger, a Novell spokesman has revealed. The confirmation, which came in a terse message posted to Novell's website, seems to rule out questions of whether Unix assets are part of some 882 patents being sold to a Microsoft-led consortium, CPTN Holdings, as part of the deal."

Re:We gotta buy them.

[Kaz Kylheku]

Unix has already been in Microsoft's reach. Microsoft had a Unix product called Xenix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix [wikipedia.org]

Xenix is what SCO bought in order to produce SCO UNIX.

Re:"whether Unix assets are part of some 882 paten

[zzatz]

Sequent patented read-copy-update, now owned by IBM. There may be others. But none from Novell, as far as I know.

Re:Who takes WordPerfect patents?

[bobdevine]

Hard to tell which patents are included in the purchase.

The most detailed document is the 8-K filing but it doesn't list the patents

http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/758004/000119312510266513/d8ka.htm [sec.gov]

Re:Attach who?

[rubies]

The name is a blast from the past for anyone who worked in IT in the 1980s.

They sold a line of IBM 3270 terminal emulation software and some IBM PC compatible communication cards so you could work at your new fangled PC while still looking at the corporate software on the IBM mainframe. I thought they died when 3270 comms protocols went TCP/IP but apparently a shell of the company has struggled on for years sitting on a bunch of acquired patents from subsumed competitors.

Their SDLC cards were a total bitch to work with too - especially if you were a gumby like me and had never seen a 3270 terminal or mainframe but the sales guy wanted to ship a bunch of PCs into some government department "ready to wear". For this reason the company name gives me the shudders.

To be more precise

[eric76]

Novell's Chief Marketing officer stated:

Here's a message from Novell about the merger, from John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Officer: On November 22, 2010, Novell issued a press release announcing a definitive merger agreement under which Attachmate Corporation (“Attachmate”) would acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash (“Merger Agreement”). Novell will continue to own Novell’s UNIX copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate. Novell filed a Form 8-K/A with the SEC on November 22, 2010, with respect to the Merger Agreement.

That is, Novell will be a subsidiary of Attachmate and Novell will continue to own the copyrights.

Re:"whether Unix assets are part of some 882 paten

[arivanov]

Wrong.

At least a couple of the networking patents (the really scary ones) apply to any network device there including some of the fundamentals on the way iptables, marking and QoS are interfaced. You can basically wipe out the current prevalence of Linux in the home networking market in no time with these and a suitable budget to back the effort.

There are other scary ones there as well from the days when Novell still did networking.